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Friday, 16 March 2018

Recently, I was talking to an annoying perky slim
person. It was four in the
afternoon. Here’s what she said:

“I’m really hungry because I forgot to have lunch today.”

Eh, what? Are you
kidding me? Is this person human? Who
forgets to have lunch?

No, really. Have you
ever worked in an office? It goes
something like this:

Any sane person I know who works for a living starts
clock-watching at 11:30, at the latest. Only half an hour…only twenty minutes…I’ll
go to the bathroom. Talk to Rachel in
accounting. Is it noon yet? WILL THAT CLOCK EVER MOVE?

Things aren’t much different if you are an author writing
from home. It is currently 11:06
am. I have decided to write this humour
column to distract myself from the lure of the last-night leftovers. Because I know from experience that if I eat
lunch at 11, then dinner somehow gets downed by 3:30. And even the Hobbits don’t indulge in second
dinner.

To set the record straight, I have never missed a meal in my
life. Okay, I’ve been toilet-bowl-sick
and passed on solid food, but only because I knew it wouldn’t stay down in its
current form. I didn’t *forget* to eat.

The 3 o-clock meeting has some of the same attributes. I’m willing to bet that the annoyingly slim
person above hasn’t even thought about the fact that the main virtue of morning
or afternoon meetings is the plate of muffins in the table center. Lose your muffins, lose your allies. And wait
for the grumbling. Not just stomachs.

Speaking of stomachs, more annoyingly slim person dialogue I have been witness to:

“Ooh. I ate a whole egg. I bet you can see the bulge in my stomach
now.”

“I’m starving. Do you
feel like soup? I could really down a
whole cup of fat-free chicken broth with nothing in it. Yum.”

“Salad. Let’s have a
salad. We can use lemon juice instead of
salad dressing, if you’re worried about the calories.” <eyes drop to my waist>

Okay, the clock is getting closer to 12:00, so I'll wrap this up quickly by circling back to the post title:

What kind of planet are these people from, who forget to
eat?

My take on people who forget to eat is that they are
probably from some place like Mars or Jupiter where they don’t have carbs
growing conveniently out of the ground. Which
makes them aliens.

I always knew slim people were aliens.

Final joke I sold to a standup comedian back in the day:

“I had the flu once.
It was awful. I couldn’t eat a
thing for three hours.”

Of course, those infamous burglaries were all long before. Kitty retired
a few years ago after breaking an ankle in a bad fall while leaving a second
story window. Now she divides her time between her little house in the forest
and the Holy Cannoli Retirement Home, visiting my elderly relatives who reside
there. Many of them are dotty. Not Kitty. Her brain cells are in for the long
haul.

The B-Team is about scamming, but not the usual type so
common in today’s society where people are scammed for their money on the
Internet. It is about outright theft where the victim loses a diamond necklace
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those trying to find the jewellery are
the ones who are scammed.

The
B-Team, a modern version of the A Team so popular on 1980’s TV, try to solve
the crime. The team members are young Canadian Italian adults, well-versed in
crime, who should have no trouble doing so. Instead, they are completely
fooled.

The
necklace belongs to a recently divorced woman who believes that it was stolen
by her former husband and is now being worn by his new wife. In a surprise
twist, it turns out that the woman is not the divorced wife. The B-Team has no
reason to doubt her and plan to get the necklace back. Instead, they are
totally fooled by the woman, but, with the help of other members of the Italian
community, they retrieve the necklace and return it to its rightful owner. The
B-Team is well written, attention grabbing and fun. Once started, most
readers will be hooked and have a hard time putting the book down.

Recommended.

Thomas F. Chambers, a retired college
teacher and author, lives in North Bay, ON.

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